Why You Shouldn’t Fail Fast
The dogma of scrum, lean, agile and failing fast to learn is flawed.
Designing a motivating experience isn’t always achieved through the strict application of agile. Small iterations sound nice in theory but they also can break up the experience power of designs.
What users want is a seamless experience that keeps them motivated throughout.
Why the Fail Fast Convention is Flawed (It Builds Frankensteins)
Do you really want your product managers to fail , and fail often, and fail fast?
Silicon Valley has spewed this rhetoric for a few years now. Sure, like any philosophy, it may have helped to create some giant successes. But when applied to Gamification design, it can be a recipe for wasted time, wasted effort, and wasted resources.
If you want to produce a truly engaging user journey in a gamified product, you need a cohesive design to create it. Agile is good at producing an arm, then a leg, then a head, then a body. You may achieve a working Frankenstein, but is that the experience you want for your user?
The Octalysis way, the entire journey
We aren’t saying we don’t believe in the power of iterations. Striving for constant improvement will help almost any design. We too are wary of building a tanker that can’t change course anymore.
But, as a baseline, we at least need an engaging activity loop to be present in all four phases of the experience.
We bring our design lens from the multifaceted Octalysis Gamification Framework to every one of our hundreds of business consultations and designs. Because our framework hones in on human ‘s deepest motivational needs, we are able to increase the success rate of product designs precisely because we can address user needs across the 4 phases of an experience (for several different player types at once!).
Even better, we can predict the success of our designs based on our application of the framework across hundreds of projects, across numerous industries.
“Our product is different.”
You may think you are building something new, something special. Something different. This may lead you to build fast, to favor iteration over planning. Why? If you are doing something new and different, why not take your time to design for the correct human motivations?
But even if your product is different, the human beings that are using your product are the same human beings that are using every other product on the planet.
Analyzing human motivation, then designing for it.
Understanding the motivations of humans can be tricky.
That’s why we build the Octalysis framework and tested it rigorously against many of the best products , from Facebook to Snapchat to Self-Driving Cars.
The secret sauce.
Most experiences are either too extrinsic or too intrinsic OR either too White hat or too Black hat (the user feels too much control or too little control).
These 4 areas represent quadrants of motivation that you definitely want to play with in your product design. This way, you will be harnessing motivation to generate desired actions, the beginning of a core activity loop.
Now, as you iterate, you’ll have a context within which to iterate. Your user journey can remain stable while you tweak the design to provide the right motivational nudges for the different types of users in your experience!
The result of patient design: people eventually start coming back for more and more.
Talk to us today and we’ll give you an audit of your entire user experience from the Octalysis design perspective.
Contact us right now.
Joris@OctalysisGroup.com
